In
the Catalytic Age optimists were happy because life was getting better, while
pessimists felt justified because it was going downhill. The only thing they
could agree on was that the process of change was speeding up.

The Planetary
Guardians knew they were both correct, that the seeming bad and good news were
the balancing act of humanity’s one mind. People were caught in details: war
and peace, starvation and glut, ignorance and technology; bombarded by details
too fast for them to absorb.

The Guardians
could see everything as a whole. They knew the Plan and thought in eons, while
individual humans, with their tiny span, lived in months, years, and decades.
The Guardians knew that humanity’s reaching toward inner and outer space was
the infant mind seeking to expand its limits. When they heard of a new human
war, they knew it was the child’s left hand hitting its right.

Not only could
they see the big picture, but they also knew every detail. Their machines
measured what was humanly unmeasurable. They knew that on January 15, 1992, at
3 a.m., everyone asleep in the Eastern Standard Time Zone of the United States
of Abasia dreamed the same dream for four seconds. They knew that on December
19, 1908, 98% of the people in China scratched their left wrists sometime that
day. They knew the same thing had happened in Greece on August 1, 522 B.C. The
magnitude of these occurrences was ten followed by a quintillion zeros and
their rate of increase was geometric. Thus the Guardians knew to the day when
humanity would realize its oneness.